I would like to build a website from the ground up. The website would have both registered users and guest users, need to store large amounts of data, and building a secure and scalable website would be top priorities.

I tend to be a perfectionist, classic ADHDer, and I often get hung up when things don't transfer from my head to paper well.

Understanding that about myself I think keeping a minimalistic design approach would be best, especially considering graphic design is not one of my strong suits. Also, I think I need to have a specific plan and strategy in place before I attempt this.

I come from a VB6, VB.NET, SQL, Windows Environment background.

I am looking for technology recommendations that are in line with my current background, book recommendations, what order to read the books in, and overall design & strategy advice that wouldaddress the entire process of creating a fairly large and complex website.

Obviously this is a pretty wide scope and could include things like design patterns and theory, testing, deployment, best practices, visual studio, asp, css, html, javascript, web services..

Just listing all that makes the task feel overwhelming, and I am looking for advice to make that list more manageable!

Niraj_Pandey
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2012-07-28T02:21:43Z —
#2

You seem to have similar problem as me as I always have huge amount of ideas but always find it difficult to put it in paper. I don't think I am good enough to advise you on most stuff (as I am myself new to .NET environment) but have a look at the chrome extension called trello. It really has helpled me to organise my thought process. Might be of use to you too.

And if you are making the site on your own, make sure you have clearly written down at least an overview of features. I have suffered a lot by thinking I know what to do and diving head first.

markbrown4
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2012-07-28T02:59:00Z —
#3

You couldn't lift a book that covers full stack development with Microsoft technologies. It's fair enough that you want to use familiar tools but I wouldn't rule out the others based on that.

My only recommendation are these:- If you're wanting to learn more about html, css, javascript then start there first and don't worry about the back-end- Don't take any front-end tech advice from any book on Microsoft tech- Look at ASP.NET MVC and don't touch web forms- Azure might be a good fit if you want to deploy to a cloud environment- Use git

It also depends what kind of application you are planning to build, one "with users and a lot of data" could be anything Personally, I've found the Rails stack to be far more productive and enjoyable to build. But ASP.NET MVC borrowed a lot of their ideas and is pretty good, if you don't mind the licensing fees.